Surprise Visitor

On day 2 of Immersion, the whole crew was just finishing up breakfast when someone said, "Hey is that a bear over there." To my complete surprise there was a real live bear in a meadow in the distance. One of my fears going into the course was bears, so I was of course quite intrigued. The bear looked quite peaceful and cute, until it showed up at our camp! Mostly, it seemed interested in smelling our packs. And then all of a sudden it ran off with one of my instructors packs. At this point we decided we definitely needed to get out of there sooner rather than later. As we continued to pack up camp, the bear showed up in a tree and tried to bully some of the other members of the group out of their food. He then showed up again at camp and stole a food bag. At that point, our food bags were extremely full so it was a pretty big deal that we might be losing an entire food bag. We finally managed to shew the bear away.

We then decided to send out a search party for the food bag and backpack. The pack wasn't far outside of camp, but we had to disperse quite far to retrieve the food bag. The bear had completely torn the food bag apart, but to our surprise he had only taken one snack bag out and left the rest. It was pretty amazing that we were even able to find the food bag, much less to find food in the bag. After we recovered everything, we decided to make our way to the first water source.

As we were learning about water filters and the system of cleaning the water for us to drink, we discovered that the bear had followed us! He continued to try to get close to us. Our instructors were a little nervous at this point and decided to get the bear spray ready. Of course, some of us thought it was really cool and were trying to snap pictures. We quickly got the water we would need for the day and hiked away in efforts to lose the bear. This time it worked.

The whole experience was really helpful for me. Even though the bear was relentless, the event really made me feel a lot better about bears. The bear didn't seem intimidating or aggressive at all the entire time. In general, he seemed totally uninterested in us as humans. It was just the experience I needed to feel a lot more comfortable in the woods.

On a side note: It was raining on and off that day, but the rain jackets they provided us with were really hot. In an effort to still stay dry, but not get too hot I chose to wear my jacket on my head and on top of my pack. Everyone in the group decided I looked just like a turtle. When I look at the picture now though, it appears as though I was creating some kind of hiding device from the bear. I also managed to fall straight backwards onto my pack when trying to get over a huge log. What a day!